Visceral Hacking or Packet Wanking? The Ethics of Digital Code

Abstract

Although hacking is painted as destructive and anti‐social in the eyes of the mainstream media, many hackers seek to reclaim it and its meaning as a harmless if not socially beneficial activity. One strategy is to construct a boundary between legitimate hacking and the activities of the much maligned script kiddies, inspired by a ‘hacker ethic’. This hacker ethic springs directly from hacker practice and thus emerges from the visceral register, particularly that associated with pleasure. It is also engaged in a politics of becoming which attempts to extend ethical principles of equality and freedom to information environments and applications. This paper argues that the presence of the ‘other’ of hacking continues to contaminate hacking because of the ambiguous and contradictory nature of this ethic. It argues that the ambiguities inherent in the visceral source of hacking’s ethical orientation will continue to destabilise its legitimacy. Further, hacking cannot justify itself based on appeals to the virtues of hacking skill without contradicting its own moorings in the politics of becoming. To illustrate this argument, the paper looks at a case study of script kiddies and their involvement in distributed denial of service attacks against seven corporate websites in February 2000.

Notes

¹ One example is Kevin Mitnick, who was arrested in 1995 on hacking‐related charges. As Thomas writes:

He was imprisoned in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detension Center a ‘pretrial detainee’ for four years awaiting trial. During his detention, stories circulated about Mitnick that raised concerns so grave that Judge Marianne Pfaelzer went as far as denying him the right to a bail hearing. For those four years, Mitnick was held in a maximum‐security facility, permitted visits only from his attorneys and his immediate family. His only contact to the outside world was on the telephone. Government attorneys refused to provide evidence to be used against him, citing its ‘proprietary nature’, and an attorney of Mitnick’s (a court‐appointed panel attorney) was denied his fees (billed at the rate of sixty dollars per hour) by the court over the summer of 1997 because the judge ruled them excessive. Pfaelzer told attorney Don Randolph, ‘You are spending too much time on this case’. (2002: 205)

² Mainstream hackers fall into two categories which are engaged in a significant language war with each other, traceable to a considerable difference of opinion about the correct execution and rationale of hacking. Old school hackers, as Thomas (2002) notes, were well financed in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by academic institutions, where they had access to large systems they could explore and attempt to fathom, developing elite skills and knowledge in the process. Most went on to form digital companies and become open software contributors. They tend to abhor new school hackers, who came on the scene later, in conjunction with the genesis of the Internet. Without financial backing or large computer systems to explore like the old school culture, new school hackers began to make it a practice of breaking into networked systems to learn, to expose security holes, and to practise hacking skills. This means that their ethical commitments deviate from each other along certain lines. For the purposes of examining hackers’ self‐ascribed distinction from script kiddies, however, these differences can be overlooked, since the main bulk of their ethico‐political commitments remain similar.

³ Unfortunately there is not the space here to reflect on further aspects of the construction of the other of hacking – i.e. virus writers and warez d00dz. However, the main thrust of this argument pertains to these cultures as well. For more information on these hacking cultures and their politics, see Best (2003b), Best and Lewis (2000), and Tetzlaff (2000).

⁴ As my argument will illustrate, I conceive ethics and politics to be mutually constitutive of each other in a back‐and‐forth movement between politics of becoming and ethical claims. Neither can be reduced to the other, but often the two need to be thought of together. I will refer to ethics and politics specifically when I dwell on these separate moments, and ethico‐politics when I make reference to the broader movement between them.

⁵ I will follow Connolly (1999) and Lewis (2000) in much of this, with some modification.

⁶ See note 2.

⁷ Following Critchley’s (2002) characterisation of Laclau, ‘Politics is the realm of the decision, of action in the social world, of what Laclau, following Gramsci, calls hegemonisation. Hegemonisation is understood as actions that attempt to fix the meaning of social relations. If we can see politics with the category of hegemony, and in my view it is best conceived with that category, then politics is an act of power, force and will that is contingent through and through’. Since hacking attempts to re‐fix the meanings of equality and freedom by extending their impact, it does not merely affirm an ethical principle but engages in a politics of becoming.

⁸ At this point it seems important to contrast my approach with that offered by Himanen in The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (2001). Although, as indicated in the title, hacker ethics are Himanen’s focus, on my reading he takes too much for granted from hackers’ own self‐ascriptions. As such, he provides another iteration of the generally circulating hacker ethic described above, without probing why this ethic cannot be thought outside of a politics of becoming. Taylor’s (1999) discussion of hacker ethics is more useful in the way he explores a number of the effects of hacking practice and its discursive construction; some of these insights could potentially be woven into the type of multivalue consequentialism with regard to diverse computer practices that I argue for below.

⁹ Connolly unduly restricts, I think, the potential of a concept as useful as a politics of becoming by affixing it too firmly to emergent identities (fluid, contingent and ongoing but nonetheless identities). My use emphasises the becoming of politics itself and its ethical standing, rather than the becoming of particular identities.

¹⁰ Taylor’s comprehensive study of the multiple subjective motivations for hacking is also relevant here. He categorises these motivations into six themes: ‘1. Feelings of addiction; 2. The urge of curiosity; 3. Boredom with the educational system; 4. Enjoyment of feelings of power; 5. Peer recognition; 6. Political acts’ (1999: 46). In this list, ties to pleasure are evident especially in numbers 2 and 4, but also as a motivation to overcome the boredom listed in 3. Addiction and peer recognition are layers of visceral and affective embodiment it would be interesting to explore further (although peer recognition also evidently folds back into skill‐derived pleasures affirmed in hacker ethics, and addiction could be seen as the hyper‐extension of pleasure beyond its own pleasurable horizon). Number 6, political acts, indicates the thickening of threads of conscious thought (the involvement of the cortex in Connolly’s discussion), which explains the momentum toward political hacking discussed below.

¹¹ Indeed, this is a major shortcoming of a particular normative application of post‐structuralism which privileges an ethics of immanence and the power of becoming‐active. For instance, in the words of Daniel Smith, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti‐Oedipus ‘attempted to diagnose the contemporary mechanisms of “microfascism” […] that cause us to desire the very things that dominate and exploit us and that cause us to fight for our servitude as stubbornly as though it were our salvation. At the same time, the book attempted to set forth the concrete conditions under which a mode of existence can come into possession of its own power, in other words, how it can become active’ (Smith 1998: 263). Read as a description of contemporary society, this seems a good diagnosis. But taken a step farther, indicated in this second sentence, and in Foucault’s reading of the work as a book of ethics, it ends up leading us on to less stable territory. In its sharp attempt to evade grounding and the centrality of universal moral law, this breed of ethics ends up centralising a commitment to becoming‐active as a privileged mode of existence. Among other problems, key here is the way in which becoming‐active finds its expression in being‐against. The affirmation of overcoming domination and exploitation as the purpose of this becoming‐active leads to a focus on resistance in and for itself, even when relatively unspecified, ambiguous and indeterminate as in the case of much script kiddie activity.

¹² If we focus solely on this second principle – and build a morality based on it – we risk returning to a virtue ethics, this time instilled at the level of a culture instead of an individual (no less insidious of course). The problem with an ethic of cultivation is that it teeters on the edges of a virtue ethics, and in this way folds back into problematic validations of modes of existence. At the same time, a commitment to cultural conditions of emergence seems necessary in order to take into account the visceral registers of being and ethico‐political potentials of practice. The visceral is particularly active in the emergence and sustenance – as well as change and rupture – of ethical and political commitments.

However, there is a second possibility. We can imagine an ethic being cultivated through a self‐referential politics of becoming in relation to particular conditions of possibility. If we find that this politics of becoming is worthwhile and ethical (and here we can apply our multivalue consequentialism), we can maintain that this ethic can and should be sustained and its conditions for emergence encouraged. We place the valuing of a particular cultural formation not at the centre of a morality, but as one part of it. We also suggest that its conditions of possibility are accidental but fortunate – and subject to ongoing revision as they continue to emerge, sustain themselves, and relate to new circumstances and ethical‐political claims.

¹³ The globalisation movement is a loosely coordinated global form of resistance, primarily aimed at processes, policies and institutions associated with neo‐liberal economic globalisation, mobilised by fluid articulation between multiple interest‐based publics. There is a growing literature on this kind of activism. Denning (1999), Meikle (2002) and Vegh (2003) deal specifically with the use of hacktivism for political aims. Other more general literature on globally networked activism includes Norris (2002), Spurgeon (2001) and Starr (2000), as well as the essays collected in Cohen and Rai (2000), della Porta et al. (1999), Gills (2000), Hirst and Khilani (1996), and Jordan and Lent (1999). Also see Best (2005).

¹⁴ Meikle’s (2002) extended discussion of the Electronic Disturbance Theatre provides several good ethico‐political justifications for the use of electronic civil disobedience as a form of public protest. He points out that the site where participants download the software gives explicit warnings of the responsibility which is involved in the disobedience, much like a ‘real‐life’ sit in, including the possibility of government surveillance, computer damage and the side‐effect of blockages to general public web access. Further, FloodNet makes use of browsers’ ‘file not found’ function and requests non‐existent files; this means that the systems administrator, when looking over the day’s logs, will be confronted by a list of requests for things like ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’. However, the level of awareness of the participatory and informed nature of the activity is much less likely to travel beyond those directly involved and on to the media. And it is the media, as Meikle points out, which is the ultimate goal of the message, in order to receive coverage of the issues the electronic civil disobedience is supporting. Which is why I suggest that, particularly due to its effects on public image and identity, the high moral ground and public mandate of electronic civil disobedience might ultimately be invisible and its activism indistinguishable from the much‐loathed script kiddie attacks.

¹⁵ In the case of virus writers and warez dudes, particularised hacking skill sets are even more obviously a source of value. The distinction between knowledge for its own sake (the writing of a virus and the playful trickery of relatively innocuous viral forms) and the use or abuse of that knowledge (the release and re‐writing of more damaging viruses) is mobilised as a legitimisation for virus writing, from the point of view of the viral culture itself. This argument uses precisely the invocation of principles of artistry and skill as its defence – regardless of suggestions by old and new school hacking that virus creation is devoid of these qualities. A similar justification underlies the culture of the warez dudes or ‘the [Demo or Cracking] Scene’ – the culture of hacking which revolves around the breaking of copyright protection on encrypted software and the distribution and collection of these cracked versions (Tetzlaff 2000). Members of the Scene claim the legitimacy of their activity in terms of: 1. the skill and pleasure of the crack itself, described in one article as ‘a lot like solving crosswords’ (Walleij 1998); 2. the artistry involved in building up software collections, a lifestyle of warez collecting where ‘enthusiasts generally acquire large libraries of software, most of which they have no desire or ability to ever use […] It’s a full‐blown avocation that takes up a considerable amount of time’ (Tetzlaff 2000: 104). The skill of the cracking and the beauty of the program thus contests the ascription of the culture as one consisting only of ‘lamers’ who have ‘no skill or artistic expression’ (scorpio n.d.).

¹⁶ See note 1.